803 SW2D 272 - Johnson v. State

How this case has been cited

Cited by 205 later decisions — most recently February 2026 · most notably Carmouche v. State (2000), Heitman v. State (1991)

2 federal appellate · 203 state decisions

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

CLINTON, Judge,

¶1dissenting.

¶2A recognized privilege is highly valued and scrupulously protected in our own rules of criminal evidence and elsewhere in the Rule of Law. In my judgment testimony erroneously obtained by breach of the spousal privilege may not then be used to render the error harmless. Beyond that the majority falls back on a harm analysis it disapproved in Harris v. State, 790 S.W.2d 568, at 587 (Tex.Cr.App.1989): “[A]n appellate court should not determine the harmfulness of an error simply by examining whether there was overwhelming evidence to support the defendant’s guilt.” Certainly, the majority fails to direct its focus on the factors emphasized in the methodology outlined in Harris, at 587-588.

¶3To diminishing the guarantee of our spousal privilege by overruling the second point of error, I respectfully dissent.